The Hit List

by Holly Seddon

  David Ross appears easily, a more smiley picture than the one on the dark web site. He has his arms around two young boys and all of them wear matching rugby tops. That’s as far as she can get; photos, friends, profile are all private. Just like Rosie.

  There is no Andrew Mackintosh on Facebook that fits either the age, the thumbnail or the location. And of course, no Pavel Bourean.

  Eyes flick up.

  ‘OK, settle down,’ Marianne murmurs in the direction of whispering mouths at the side of the classroom.

  Eyes down again.

  Marianne taps to wake her phone up in the dark space on her lap. She goes back to Rosie’s locked profile and stares at her. She’s undeniably pretty. London-based too. Marianne’s heart lurches – was Greg sleeping with her? If so, why were the other names on that list? Jesus fucking Christ, was he sleeping with all of them? Some kind of group thing? Shit, should I be tested? Should Noah? It could have been a list of people who needed to be informed that Greg had caught something? Is that why he needed to see Jenna, did it go back that far?

  Marianne shakes her head. He’d hardly write those names down, not in full like that. It would just be first names surely, if this was a list of lovers. And why would that put them on a hit list? It wouldn’t.

  Why does it have to be about sex?

  Eyes flick up. They’re all working. Or at least pretending to.

  Marianne turns to Google, searches ‘Rosie Parsons London nurse’. Marianne stares out at the class and then looks down, as surreptitiously as she can. She’d searched Google before but not specifically, not with a place and profession. This time, the results are news articles, a lot of news articles.

  ‘Oh god.’ It’s out before she can stop it and thirty-five heads look up.

  ‘You all right, miss?’ a small voice from the front asks.

  ‘I …’ Marianne swallows, the phone on her lap. ‘I, um, I’m fine. Just ripped a nail. Thank you, though, Mia.’ She waits for the children to stop staring, every second painful. ‘On with your work, you lot.’

  A dizzying number of articles, and they all form a three-act tragedy.

  LONDON NURSE STRUCK OFF FOLLOWING PATIENT DEATH

  FAMILY SUE NEGLIGENT NURSE

  DISGRACED NURSE FOUND DEAD AFTER SUSPECTED

  DRUG OVERDOSE

  A bolt slides across Marianne’s chest. Her heart bangs angrily against it.

  Rosie Parsons is already dead.

  Sam

  Guilt is a potent weapon and it was stamped through Rosie Parsons like Brighton rock.

  Do no harm. The very first principle of nursing. And yet she had. So much harm. And however angry the parents of her victim were, they couldn’t match the guilt she already felt. She didn’t seem surprised to see me again; I wonder how long she’d been expecting me.

  Marianne Heywood looks guilty too. I don’t know how or why but it’s written across her face. The hunted look in her eyes when I walked past her yesterday, creeping along the street in her coat and pyjamas. The way she chews her nails when she’s held up at traffic lights. The furtive glances over her shoulder as she walks into school, her hair sticking to the sweat misting on her forehead.

  What I do know very well is that she is widowed. That she is already sleeping with someone new. And that he has a child. Most important of all, I know that upon her death, she, and I, will be free.

  Marianne

  The bell shrieks. Marianne stumbles as she stands, gathers up her things and pushes out of the classroom door. She’s absorbed into the crush of young bodies fleeing for home.

  Rosie Parsons is dead.

  As she walks to the staffroom, she wraps herself tighter in her cardigan, closing her eyes and smelling the wool to ground herself. I’m here, I’m safe, I’ve done nothing wrong. She opens her eyes. That’s not strictly true.

  *

  In the corner of the staffroom, she gorges on the news on her laptop, circling the details like a vulture. Rosie Parsons was a paediatric nurse at St Clement’s Hospital in Tottenham. She was also a drug addict. Six months ago, a seven-year-old patient died in her care, through her negligence. Rosie was high on stolen prescription drugs at the time.

  Those same drugs killed her three weeks ago. ‘No suspicious circumstances.’ Clearly everyone believed it was an accidental overdose, but was Rosie on the hit list as payback? If she was, that didn’t explain Greg’s list. He died before the child.

  Greg is dead. A child is dead. Rosie Parsons is dead.

  None of this makes sense, but this latest discovery is far from reassuring. A hit list and one of the five is dead. Did Rosie inject herself, did she swallow pills? Did someone else hold the needle or press the tablets into her hand?

  And a child, a child? Any grief Marianne has felt must be a sideshow compared to that. She thinks guiltily of Greg’s parents. When did she last call them? The grief of a parent, as unnatural a pain as it must be possible to feel. Born out of a love she’ll never—

  Marianne doesn’t finish the thought because a vacuum cleaner has started nudging at her feet. She looks up at the face of a young cleaner she’s not seen before. He looks exhausted. Wordlessly, Marianne lifts up her feet and keeps staring at the screen as the cleaner works on. By the time she’s realised she must have seemed like an arsehole, it’s too late to apologise. She leaves instead.

  Outside, the sky has settled to a dense grey. Her car sits almost alone, swimming in the scrubby carpark that will one day, allegedly, house a new science block. Although this roofless space is behind an automatic gate, she still crosses carefully, listening out for footsteps.

  Did Rosie hear footsteps?

  Inside the cool of her car, Marianne fumbles with the key and drives to the exit, cursing the gates to open faster. The faded letters on her hand catch the light as she waits: poison.

  On the way home, Marianne swings into the empty carpark of a Homebase store, a huge monolithic building for the worship of all things handy and homey. Not her natural habitat and a ridiculous juxtaposition to everything else that’s happening.

  She catches sight of someone in a store uniform and heads over before she realises her mistake.

  ‘Hi, miss.’ Robbie, Marc’s younger brother, smiles.

  Fuck. Her heart has been permanently racing since she first looked at the dark web, but it climbs even faster now, manic in her chest. Why him? Why now?

  ‘Robbie,’ she says, holding up her scrawled-on skin. ‘I didn’t know you worked here.’ She smiles in what she hopes is an aloof and casual manner. ‘Where would I find mice poison?’

  He smiles and she looks down. Ordinarily she’d be pleased to see a pupil holding down a part-time job, greeting people politely and willing to help her. In this case, she’d rather have checked every aisle herself.

  He clamps his hand onto her elbow despite her obvious discomfort and steers her through several corners and aisles.

  ‘There.’ He points to a collection of bottles with euphemistic silhouettes of cartoon mice. ‘Choose your weapon.’

  ‘Thanks, Robbie.’

  ‘Do you need any more help, miss?’ he grins, rising up and down on the balls of his feet.

  ‘No. No, thank you.’

  He turns away and she stares at the bottles, willing her heart to calm down. There’s a smorgasbord of murderous methods for little creatures. Behind her, someone clears their throat. She turns and takes in Robbie’s smirking face.

  ‘My brother’s home for a few more weeks,’ he says, the corners of his mouth twitching. Marianne says nothing. ‘He’d love it if you looked him up again, y’know?’

  He waits, bouncing even faster up and down, energy crackling through him.

  ‘Right,’ she says, looking at the shelves.

  ‘Or should I say he’d love it if you hooked up with him again?’ Before she can reply, he jogs off, amused with himself. Fuck, does he know? Surely Marc wouldn’t have trusted him with … anything.

  Robbie cut a familiar shape from behind
with broad shoulders and messy hair but he wasn’t like his older brother. Marc had been far from a star pupil, but he’d desperately wanted to succeed so he could get to university and away from his family.

  ‘I just feel like a fork in a knife drawer, Miss,’ he’d said, his eyes filling but making no move to wipe them. It was an honesty that boys his age would never normally risk and before she could even think about it, she’d decided to help him. Nothing much, a little more attention in class, some gentle nudging, a few extra meetings in lunchtimes to guide him with coursework. It wasn’t so much the work, she realised after a while; it was the attention that was helping him. It told him that someone thought he could do it and so Marc started to believe it.

  She watches Robbie swagger off around a corner. Gifted with the same handsome face, the same athletic build, but ugly nonetheless. Marc had worked himself exhausted and triumphed in his A levels. Then, when he made it to university, he wrote and told her, he realised the real work was just starting. Not the learning but the relentless work of still trying to find his tribe, his drawer of forks.

  By the time she saw him again in person, he was twenty-one. A proper man. But an ex-pupil nonetheless. An ex-pupil whose little postcards and missives she’d hidden from Greg. An ex-pupil whose emails she’d deleted guiltily, but not before smiling through her reply. The contact had slowed a little when he’d finally found his flock.

  By the time she saw him again in the flesh, Greg had been dead a month. Marc had heard about it from someone, Robbie probably, and had called around to see her. He’d brought flowers and a takeaway. She’d poured them both some of Greg’s whisky and let him hug her. It had turned into a kiss. They had spent the night swimming in the grey area between right and wrong.

  They both knew it could never be repeated. But it was everything she needed at the time.

  Marianne breathes out slowly, then grabs a lethal-looking can.

  Sam

  The target should be home soon.

  I watch across the rooftops. Through tower blocks surging like spires. Layer upon layer of different houses, flats and offices make up this view, pasted one on top of the other like papier mâché.

  The air is an ambient temperature, I barely feel it on my skin. The whole sky is matte grey blending into blue, almost invisible.

  I stare and I wait.

  Marianne

  Marianne manages to park close to her flat. She finishes the last of her cigarettes while sitting in the car with the evening sun streaming through the windscreen, working up the courage to go inside. Her flat – their flat – had always been a safe haven, now it’s poisoned. She looks at the Homebase bag on her passenger seat. Greg poisoned it, she thinks, before she can stop herself.

  She locks up and walks to her front door, looking around for god knows what. Everything out here is the same as ever. The same noise. The same dirt in the creases of the pavement. The metal shutter on the old café with its colourful splash of graffiti.

  She opens the door and stoops for the post. Nothing much, a pizza leaflet with deals she’ll never take up, a ‘dear resident’ letter from the water company about digging up the road months from now and a BT bill still addressed to Greg. As a reflex, she pats her pocket for a cigarette and remembers she finished the pack.

  Climbing these stairs used to mean something so different. The last few steps before she and Greg could cocoon themselves away. Unspoken traditions that she only noticed when they were broken. New traditions not yet carved with Noah.

  The first working day that she opened the front door as a newly minted widow, one year ago, everything was exactly the same as the day before. The crappy carpet, the magnolia paint, the smell of grease fat from the café. And when she’d opened up the inner door to the flat, it didn’t look like a world that had ended. It looked like a still from a film she was no longer allowed to watch. No smell of cooking, no sound of Greg whistling out of tune and yelping as tiny specks of oil splattered his hairy arms while he sautéed potatoes.

  Marianne had closed the door and ran back down the stairs on that first evening last year. She’d climbed back in her car and driven away fast. She didn’t plan a destination, just needed endless miles under the tyres, radio up loud. Out into Essex, to Harwich and then up the coast. She’d refilled the tank somewhere in East Anglia, standing on an empty forecourt.

  She’d eventually driven home through a blackened sky, eyelids sagging, white knuckles on the wheel.

  Today, Marianne opens up and puts her bag on the table. The first thing she notices is the smell, which is absolutely not the same as when she left it yesterday nor when she came back in here a year ago. It’s the smell of gas.

  *

  Marianne hangs back for a moment, checking her senses and taking another cautious sniff. It’s definitely gas. When was the last time she used the oven? The last piece of pie on Saturday. Fuck. She holds her breath, runs into the kitchen and tries to push up the window. It’s stuck fast. She tries again, eyes watering. Eventually it relents and whines its way up.

  After a few lungfuls of fresh air, Marianne looks at the hob. It’s definitely not on. There’s no gas escaping from it as far as she can tell. She doesn’t dare touch any of the knobs in case she triggers the spark. She pulls open the oven, then remembers that this part is electric. How Greg would laugh if he were here.

  She tries to remember what does run on gas in the flat. Her head has started to thump and she sticks her face out of the window again and breathes deeply.

  The boiler. She takes a lug of air and goes to the bathroom where the airing cupboard sits. The wooden shelves are overloaded with the same towels and sheets as always, nothing is disturbed and the smell is no stronger. It’s strongest when she goes back to the hallway, just below the loft door.

  Back out and down on the street, Marianne calls the emergency gas number. She’s told to go back in, turn the gas supply off at the meter, open all the windows and then wait outside.

  A serious, uniformed man shows up within half an hour and heads straight up with a gas detector. Marianne paces outside, wanting a cigarette more than ever. After another half an hour, she takes a tentative step on to the bottom of the stairs and waits until the uniformed man appears at the top. ‘It’s safe to come up now.’

  The loft ladder hangs from the ceiling, a petticoat of dust around its legs.

  ‘The flue pipes,’ the engineer explains, which means nothing to her. ‘They’d been leaking up there in your loft space, probably every time you used the boiler.’

  ‘For how long?’ she asks.

  ‘It’s hard to say, they were very badly damaged so it could have been gradually getting worse or …’

  ‘Could mice have done this?’ she asks, glancing at the abandoned bag of mouse poison on the table.

  ‘How big are these mice?’ he smiles. Before she can answer, he says, ‘I didn’t see any droppings up there so I’d be surprised. Anyway, I’ve fixed it now but you should get someone round to do a gas safety check as soon as possible. Do you rent?’

  She shakes her head, thinking of the scurrying feet she thought she’d heard above her. They must have been in the walls instead.

  ‘In that case, you’ll need to pay for the gas check yourself but it’s not something to scrimp on.’ She nods. ‘And that boiler is pretty old too,’ he adds. ‘You should replace it as soon as possible.’ Like the stairs carpet, the window frames and the old bathroom suite, it was something they’d planned to change at some point in the future.

  ‘I will,’ she promises. He packs up his toolkit carefully. ‘This is going to sound weird,’ she says, her voice low. ‘But is there any way a person could have done this?’

  ‘What, damaged a flue?’ He smiles like she’s told a joke. She nods and he shrugs, ‘I’m not sure why anyone would want to do that.’

  ‘But is it possible?’

  ‘Anything’s possible. But if someone wanted you to have a gas leak, there are simpler ways to do it. Like turning o
n the hob.’ Marianne nods, and follows his gaze to the overflowing ashtray.

  ‘And you were lucky not to blow yourself up,’ he says, frowning. ‘Things go wrong all the time on an older set-up like this, I see it every day. They’re accidents waiting to happen.’

  Marianne thinks of the fresh pack of fags waiting in the living-room cupboard and how close she came. She vows silently that if she survives the rest of the week, she’ll give up for good.

  Maybe.

  Sam

  I swallow my disappointment. It hits my gut and curdles into anger. The emergency gas engineer has just left, instead of the fire engine and ambulance I’d envisaged when I approached her road.

  I can see her right now, moving around her living room, opening and closing the windows like it’s some kind of game. She’s pacing, faffing, dragging her heels. At one point she closes the living-room window, then stares out over here, pressing her forehead on the glass and closing her eyes. Then she disappears, shaking her ponytail loose so her hair spills everywhere. When she comes back and pushes up the window again, I finally see the flame of her lighter.

  An hour too late. This job is already taking longer than agreed, longer than I wanted. I should be free by now. I make a fist as I walk past her door, thumping the graffiti shutters on the café below.

  Marianne

  A metallic bang from the street makes Marianne jump as she fills her holdall with clothes. She can’t think straight and doesn’t want to stay here tonight, not by herself. Accidents happen but how often do genuine accidents happen to people who are also named on an apparent hit list?

  If she tried the police again, what would they say? They would ask why she was on the dark web, an illegal activity and probably a sackable offence. They would ask if anyone had cause to wish her harm. Could she honestly answer no, even if she doesn’t know why?